Movie Review: The Internship

What happens when you make a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy? You get something that resembles the original, kind of, but there’s a definite degradation of quality. You look at your end result, say to yourself, well, everything is where it should be, but it just doesn’t look right. That about sums up The Internship, the wacky summer comedy movie starring two of America’s favorite funny actors, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson.

We’ve all seen the trailers, there’s nothing that I could possibly spoil for you, even if I wrote out the entire plot of the movie. It’s derivative comedy at its most basic. It’s two guys that don’t know anything about computers that wind up at Google as interns, competing for a handful of full-time jobs.

Get it? Because they’re old. Right? They’re so old. That’s the joke. They keep telling us over and over. “But you guys are so old!” And so Vince Vaughn has a flip phone. And they don’t know how to use computers. It’s like, come on, even my grandfather knows how to use a computer. This trope might have been slightly more believable maybe ten years ago, but by now it’s growing ever more unlikely that there exist a couple of forty year olds living in California that are really this inept in modern technology.

The movie actually starts out funny enough. There are a couple of ridiculous back-and-forths that evoke those old feelings of seeing these two guys in a movie and not automatically assuming that it’s going to suck. But they play their trump card way too early, a signature over-the-top cameo by Will Ferrell, and after that’s come and gone, the movie limps toward the finish line, realizes that it’s way too far away, and decides, whatever, they’ve already paid for the tickets, let’s just call it a day.

These sort-of comedy movies always follow such a formulaic approach to story telling. Characters find themselves in unlikely scenarios, they decide to give it their all, after one or two comical false starts, they rally together, work really hard, and start turning some heads. Of course there’s a bad guy, and of course he winds up getting under the good guys’ skin. There’s self-doubt. Vince Vaughn winds up quitting. But of course he comes back. And of course they rally again just in time.

It was the same in Dodge Ball. It was the same in Old School. It was the same in Wedding Crashers. It’s just over and over and over and over again. Throw in some really cheesy romance. Sprinkle in a scene where everybody goes out to a strip club. I’m sitting there in the theater, not really laughing at all, and I’m just thinking, this is so boring. I can’t believe I’m sitting in this seat being spoon fed the same completely unimaginative garbage summer after summer. Who’s making the money at the end of this gravy train?

To make things even lamer, it’s all a big Google commercial. They talk about Gmail and there’s the Android logo everywhere. Nobody has an iPhone. There’s an almost imperceptible walk-on role by one of the two Google cofounders. When they’re not making funny faces or acting out premature ejaculation jokes, they’re having serious conversations about Google connecting people to people, people to information, making the world a better place.

What else? I’m seriously out of stuff to say about this movie. It was so boring. I can’t believe I actually spent money to go see it. This is something that normally I’d only ever watch if I were on a really long vacation with my entire extended family, and during one of those weird in-between points, when everybody’s asleep or waiting for dinner, and we’re all just kind of hanging around the one TV wherever we’re at, and TBS is playing a “very funny!” movie, and we’re all like, The Internship, huh, we all forgot that this movie ever even came out. And we watch it, it’s terrible, but nobody makes a move to turn it off, and everybody’s a little bit more tired having had to sit through such unfunny two hours of their life.

Man, I’m so tired. I hate having to so thoroughly bash something. But what a joke. An unfunny joke. There’s nothing else to say. I’m really sad and tired now.